Lesson 11

Merry Christmas! Since I've a day off on Christmas Eve too, I figured I should finish this post. Now, this is for a lesson that was more than a week ago...

In which I learn that the verb for "to work part time" in Korean (아르바이트하다) comes from the German Arbeit, which simply means "work".

We started on Chapter 3 of the book. It's the Seoul National University book.

Basically this lesson was an introduction to other verbs (apart from "to be" and "to have" which was covered before). Lots of verbs, but just their dictionary forms (infinitives). Conjugation is next week (from the time I learnt this lesson, not from when this is posted, since it's way past both lessons).

We also learnt the names of a few common places (see vocabulary below).

Interesting that the distinction between learn and study is whether you do it alone (study - 공부하다) or with someone else's help (learn - 배우다).

For German and French (and quite possibly a few other European languages), the distinction is about whether it is your course of study or something that you study/learn in general. For example in German, you can only studieren your course of study. You do not Deutsch studieren unless you are majoring in German. Same with French, you don't étudies français, you apprends français. (Pretty sure it's the same with Italian's studiare and imparare if my memory did not fail me.)

You can, however, both 한국어를 공부해요 and 한국어를 배워요.

Pronunciation

ㄱ, ㅍ,ㅎ, combined with 예 (계, 폐, 혜)

The resulting pronunciation is [게, 페, 헤]. That is, 계 is pronunced as 게, 폐 is pronounced as 페, and 혜 is pronounced as 헤.

Apparently it used to be as written (e.g. gye for 계 instead of ge), but not any longer.

This is why 시계 (watch; clock) is pronounced shi-ge and not shi-gye. Mystery solved.

Syllables with 4 Letters

Previously, we already learnt that if the next syllable starts with ㅇ, then the final consonant "moves over" to that upcoming syllable, and then everything is fine since you can just pronounce the remaining 3. As an example, 앉아요 would be pronounced [안자요].

But what if the next syllable doesn't start with ㅇ?

You don't pronounce all 4, that's for sure. The consonant to pronounce on the bottom is the one first in alphabet order:

ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ

• 앉다 is pronounced [안다], since ㄴ comes before ㅈ.
• 읽다 is pronounced [익다], since ㄱ comes before ㄹ.

I don't have more details, and there's probably more complex rules, but this will do for now.

Vocabulary

Decided to add the Chinese if they exist and I think they'll help me remember. Sites list the traditional characters (obviously) so I'm going with that, even though I'm actually familiar with the simplified characters.